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But just like with track, rugby or singing in school musicals (yes, really), he found himself following his brother.

“Some of his suggestions have ended up with me in hospital or with broken arms. I’m hoping this one doesn’t end that way,” he said.

On Sunday at McMaster University in Hamilton, the brothers were among 28 athletes at the Ontario Bobsleigh Skeleton Association’s talent identification camp. It’s like a football combine where athletes are put through tests — sprints, broad jump, shot toss and weightlifting — to see if they have the speed and explosive power needed for the push-start sliding sports.

This dry-land testing camp was the last of four across Canada in search of the next generation of talent for the national on-ice push camp in Calgary, Sept. 25 to 27.

Twenty-year-old Michael said he’s always been a “jack of all trades, master of none.” At six-foot-one and 200 pounds he says he’s really “too big for track and too small for rugby,” his two main sports at the moment. But bobsled brakeman, which combines speed, strength and power, might make the most of all his skills. He might even get bonus points for his bushy beard, a signature of the Canadian bobsled men at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

Colin, 23, made the St. Francis Xavier University football team after playing a single year in high school. But he also knows he isn’t Olympic material in his current sport: track and field. He was watching the Sochi Olympics with roommates when someone said, “Hey Colin, it’s not too late. You can still make it to the Olympics. Go to bobsled tryouts. I kind of took the joke to the next level.”

Bobsled, he said, could be his last, best chance of wearing a Team Canada uniform on the biggest stage. No insult to the sport, but bobsled is no one’s first choice. It’s a late-entry sport that picks up athletes who have had too many football or rugby injuries, know the pro leagues aren’t going to call or realize they’ll never be Usain Bolt on the track.

“Everyone comes to us from something else,” said Esther Dalle, a former skeleton racer and now high performance director for the Ontario Bobsleigh Skeleton Association.

Though few people know it, Ontario has its own team but they have to train in Lake Placid, N.Y., the nearest track. The most fertile recruiting grounds, especially for men, are track, football and rugby — though, Dalle says, track athletes can be a bit wimpy for the needs of sliding.

The push start itself is just a few seconds long, and the race takes about a minute. But before that, hours spent outside in winter weather hauling around sleds and equipment. Football players, used to playing in late-season sleet, are better prepared for all that, she said, but track guys like two-time Olympian Justin Kripps, who grew up in Hawaii to boot, do come around to it. He piloted Canada to its strongest finish in Sochi, sixth in the two-man event, and was in the hunt for a medal in the four-man until he crashed on the second run.

“I’m not really a winter person,” said Kripps, recalling his first trip to the ice house in Calgary in 2006. “I’d never even stood on ice. The coach said, ‘Take it easy, push the sled and jump on it and get a feel for it.’

“I took maybe three walking steps and I jumped on. I barely made it to the part where it goes downhill. I came back and said, ‘That was pretty fun.’ The coaches were laughing and thinking I was an idiot.”

Now, Kripps and his team push that sled for 30 metres or so, as hard and fast as they possibly can. A bobsled race is generally won or lost on the push start. It’s the only place to generate speed. After the start, it’s up to the pilot to drive the best line possible.

That’s why so much emphasis is put on testing sprint times. Kripps and his top-tier crew run 30 metres in under 3.7 seconds and their fly time (from the 15- to 45-metre mark) is under three seconds, he said.

“If somebody did that out there (at the Hamilton camp) I would hear about it,” Kripps said.

Well, Kripps, meet Michael Phillips. His 30-metre sprint was clocked at 3.71 seconds and his 30-metre fly was 3.09. Michael and Colin, who wasn’t far behind, both posted results worthy of a national camp invite, said Dalle. But neither will be in Calgary later this week because Michael still has two more years of a mechanical engineering degree to finish and Colin doesn’t graduate in psychology and kinesiology until next June.

“It is very difficult to find the perfect athlete who meets athletic standards, is in a place in their life where they can commit the time, and can commit to it financially as well,” Dalle said.

It’s an expensive sport and financial support is hard to come by. For the Phillips brothers, the dream of bobsledding for Canada is still a few years away. And when they are ready, they would love nothing more than being on a team together. They say they bring out the best in each other.

Without his younger brother’s support, Colin said he wouldn’t be the athlete he is now. And without his pushing, Michael wouldn’t even be a bobsled camp, beating his older brother’s results.

Though he might have had fewer broken bones.

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